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At 17 years and 114 days, he was the youngest player ever to appear in a La Liga game.

While this record has since been broken by Messi's former teammate Bojan Krkic, at the time it was a huge deal. La Liga has been around since 1929 and has seen thousands upon thousands of players come through it, so setting any kind of all-time mark is an amazing feat. Had Barcelona not been a powerhouse already, Messi probably would have set the record almost a year earlier; he made his first team debut in a friendly against Porto in November 2003 when he was 16 years and 145 days old.